Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

Cinematic Landscape and Social MemoryAna Francisca de Azevedoputs into question the allocation of worlds inside modern rational spatialities, legitimatedby an ontology of the ‘I/Other’ (Barber, 1998). Within this framework, research is seen as apart of the experience of the world, an experience where space lived by a body function as agenerative nodule of a material semiotic, a nodule inside which the artefactual character ofnature results from the mutual implosion of the social and the technique. My effort is linkedto the search of a relational and critical frame that finds in art and science privileged meansfor the expression of desire and subjectivity.The design of an analytic technology mobilized for filmic interpretation should thenbe clarified. The attempt of deepening the dialogue between geography and cinema, as ageneral objective, forces the demolition of conceptual and analytic boundaries erased forlegitimating different domains of research. The challenge of understanding the relationbetween ‘impure and pure geographies’ (Gregory, 2009) allocated within a filmic documentwas answered through the definition of an analytic approach able to render the comprehensionof a complex cultural product such as the cinematic landscape and the way it operatesfor the production/reproduction of social memory. It incorporates the triangulation ofelements from social and cultural critical theories to biophilosophy.Even though this present article does not allow an expanded presentation of the theoreticaland methodological design of my programme of research, I would like to stress somecentral clues that could give a broader comprehension of its trajectory.My attempt to understand the relation between socio-cultural practices of geographyand cinema was based in three central believes; a) Matthew Gandy (2003) insistence on thefundamental importance of understanding the role of cinematic landscape outside transhistoricalcategories of space and time, b) Irit Rogoff (2000) proposal of cinema as promoter ofthe re-reading and the re-rewriting of geographical sign systems, and c) Mike Crang (2002)lecture of cinema inside a frame where our own approach to the world acts as a preontologywhich structures the mode of observation, understanding perception as an event of contactwith multiple presences and absences. From this point of departure, I developed a relationalapproach with several angles. The revision of Kracauer (1997) material aesthetics, the developmentof Bakhtinian theory applied to cinematic language, the application of iconology tocinema, reviewing and comparing the contributes of Panofsky (1982, 1993) and Aby Warburgto the interpretation of the filmic experience, the development of latourian workings by DonnaHaraway (2004), indagating landscape as a material-semiotic entity, as a nucleus of knowledgewhich is an active part of the apparatus of body production, and the influential projectof Pierre Nora (1984-1992) to national identity through the analysis of the creation of sites ofmemory (lieux de mémoires).The study of landscape in cinema erases complex questions because we are dealingwith an exponential effect of mediation of the structures of organization of experience.Primarily, due to the idea of landscape integrates a cycle of mediation of land by modernculture (Andrews, 1999). This same cycle includes mechanisms of social formation of landscapethat operated through time. Secondly, due to the fact that cinema operates as a technologyfor mediation of experience between human being and physical world. So the analysismust embrace the spiralling movement between materiality and representation. This route ofNarratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches176